Housework, a traditional topic in research on women and gender, has only recently begun to be studied from the standpoint of men. This article undertakes a comparison between France and the Netherlands, two countries that largely resemble each other from the standpoint of government intervention and the connections between work and family life, but differ in their stated political priorities regarding women and the structuring of women’s employment. This comparison allows the author to reveal trends in the division of domestic labour between the sexes that hold across the board, regardless of particular cultural differences in representations of the roles of men and women in the family. Based on national survey data on “daily timetables”, the analysis shows changes and continuity in men’s involvement in housework, first as regards the male population as a whole, and then fathers in particular. The study brings out preferences for doing housework rather than parental work among fathers in France but not in the Netherlands. These preferences are linked to a change in social representations of domestic and parental tasks that have assigned new and different values to these tasks depending on whether or not they are performed by men. “New fatherhood” appears in any case to be an image with an ideological function more than a reality in practice, at least when the objective criterion used is the amount of time spent on the daily tasks of domestic life.

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The protein and polysaccharide composition of the yeast cell wall has been examined, with the aim of explaining phenotypic variations in the flocculence character which occur during fermentation. The results show that the period of deflocculation coincides with a synthesis of mannan. Accordingly, this polysaccharide appears to act as a regulator of the intensity of flocculation by masking more or less completely the active groups of the specific fraction carrying the flocculence character. Comparative study of a flocculent and a powdery yeast in presence of 2,4‐dinitrophenol showed that the flocculent yeast possessed an intracellular biochemical mechanism—probably under genetic control—which allowed rapid utilization of mannan. From this point of view, the powdery yeast could be considered as a flocculent yeast in a permanent state of deflocculation. Chromatographic analysis of protein hydrolysates from the walls of cells gathered at the end of fermentation were characterized by an increase of 30–40% of total amino acids, without there being any important fluctuations between the proportions of individual amino acids. Taking into account the parallel decrease in mannan content at the end of fermentation, it may be concluded that it is essentially the ratio of mannan to protein which determines the physiological state of the cell.